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Per Bloomberg, https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/corporate-transparency-act-blocked-nationwide-by-texas-court this federal reporting act has been temporarily blocked by a court ruling. In the name of catching money laundering, the Treasury Department is demanding ownership information from all registered companies (Inc, LLP, etc.), in particular all the small companies. Larger companies are exempt from reporting. If you own all or part of a small company that is registered with your state department of commerce, you may want to discuss this with your lawyer or accountant.

The Corporate Transparency Act and its implementing regulations, which require US business entities to report stakeholder information to the Treasury Department, were preliminarily blocked nationwide by a Texas federal court on Tuesday.

Judge Amos L. Mazzant III of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued the injunction at the request of a family-run firearms and tactical gear retailer, called Texas Top Cop Shop Inc., among other co-plaintiff businesses and the Libertarian Party of Mississippi. Their lawsuit alleged that the CTA falls outside of Congress's powers to regulate interstate and foreign commerce because it regulates incorporated entities regardless of whether they engage in commercial activity.

"For good reason, Plaintiffs fear this flanking, quasi-Orwellian statute and its implications on our dual system of government," Mazzant wrote.

The CTA required that an estimated 32.6 million existing business entities disclose their beneficial owners to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network before 2025. The government argued that the law's function—to crack down on anonymous shell companies and deter money laundering, terrorism financing, and other illicit economic activity—falls within Congress's regulatory duties.

The court docket can be seen at, https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/TexasTopCopShopIncetalvGarlandetalDocketNo424cv00478EDTexMay28202

An earlier court action was ruled to only apply to members of the National Small Business Assn., https://www.nsbaadvocate.org/post/press-nsba-response-to-fincen-failure-to-apply-cta-ruling-fairly-to-all-small-businesses
Your AC submitter has put this off (normal procrastination) but with the hopes that someone would be able to defeat this new federal database--and that Treasury would hunt down money laundering by their own efforts.

UPDATE: An AC points out that since the story was submitted, the Government has filed an appeal.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

My year of baking lessons, guided by a full-stack engineer who teaches patience:

One year ago, I didn't know how to bake bread. I just knew how to follow a recipe.

If everything went perfectly, I could turn out something plain but palatable. But should anything change—temperature, timing, flour, Mercury being in Scorpio—I'd turn out a partly poofy pancake. I presented my partly poofy pancakes to people, and they were polite, but those platters were not particularly palatable.

During a group vacation last year, a friend made fresh sourdough loaves every day, and we devoured it. He gladly shared his knowledge, his starter, and his go-to recipe. I took it home, tried it out, and made a naturally leavened, artisanal pancake.

I took my confusion to YouTube, where I found Hendrik Kleinwächter's "The Bread Code" channel and his video promising a course on "Your First Sourdough Bread." I watched and learned a lot, but I couldn't quite translate 30 minutes of intensive couch time to hours of mixing, raising, slicing, and baking. Pancakes, part three.

It felt like there had to be more to this. And there was—a whole GitHub repository more.

[...] The Bread Code is centered around a book, The Sourdough Framework. It's an open source codebase that self-compiles into new LaTeX book editions and is free to read online. It has one real bread loaf recipe, if you can call a 68-page middle-section journey a recipe. It has 17 flowcharts, 15 tables, and dozens of timelines, process illustrations, and photos of sourdough going both well and terribly. Like any cookbook, there's a bit about Kleinwächter's history with this food, and some sourdough bread history. Then the reader is dropped straight into "How Sourdough Works," which is in no way a summary.

[...] I have found myself very grateful lately that Kleinwächter did not find success with 30-minute YouTube tutorials. Strangely, so has he.

"I have had some successful startups; I have also had disastrous startups," Kleinwächter said in an interview. "I have made some money, then I've been poor again. I've done so many things."

Most of those things involve software. Kleinwächter is a German full-stack engineer, and he has founded firms and worked at companies related to blogging, e-commerce, food ordering, travel, and health. He tried to escape the boom-bust startup cycle by starting his own digital agency before one of his products was acquired by hotel booking firm Trivago. After that, he needed a break—and he could afford to take one.

"I went to Naples, worked there in a pizzeria for a week, and just figured out, 'What do I want to do with my life?' And I found my passion. My passion is to teach people how to make amazing bread and pizza at home," Kleinwächter said.

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/manufacturing/self-assembling-electronics/

A remarkable proof-of-concept project has successfully manufactured nanoscale diodes and transistors using a fast, cheap new production technique in which liquid metal is directed to self-assemble into precise 3D structures.

In a peer-reviewed study due to be released in the journal Materials Horizons, a North Carolina State University team outlined and demonstrated the new method using an alloy of indium, bismuth and tin, known as Field's metal.

The liquid metal was placed beside a mold, which the researchers say can be made in any size or shape. As it's exposed to oxygen, a thin oxide layer forms on the surface of the metal. Then, a liquid is poured onto it, containing negatively-charged ligand molecules designed to pull individual metal atoms off that oxide layer as positively-charged ions, and bind with them.

These metal ions held in the ligands become a little like magnetic building blocks, attracted to one another, and as the ligand solution begins to flow through channels in the mold, driven by capillary action, it pulls these building blocks through with it. The mold essentially gets the blocks to line up into orderly structures, like wires, and stick to each other in place.

"Without the mold, these structures can form somewhat chaotic patterns," says Martin Thuo, corresponding author and professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University. "But because the solution is constrained by the mold, the structures form in predictable, symmetrical arrays."

Once everything is in place, the liquid part of the ligand solution begins to evaporate, which has the effect of squeezing the ligands and metal ions even closer together in their channels. Then the mold is taken away, and the final shape is slowly heated to around 600 °C (1,112 °F) and kept there for an hour.

This heating process supplies enough energy to break the chemical bonds holding the ligand molecules together, so carbon and oxygen atoms are released.

The oxygen immediately bonds to the metal ions, forming semiconductor metal oxides that fuse together with one another in a sintering process to form wires. The carbon atoms, meanwhile, organize themselves into graphene, which wraps neatly around the wires to improve their electrical conductivity, protecting them from moisture or further oxidation.
...
The team says the technique offers a faster, cheaper, more reliable way of making computer chips. "Existing chip manufacturing techniques involve many steps and rely on extremely complex technologies, making the process costly and time consuming," says Thuo. "Our self-assembling approach is significantly faster and less expensive. We've also demonstrated that we can use the process to tune the bandgap for semiconductor materials and to make the materials responsive to light – meaning this technique can be used to create optoelectronic devices.

"What's more, current manufacturing techniques have low yield, meaning they produce a relatively large number of faulty chips that can't be used. Our approach is high yield – meaning you get more consistent production of arrays and less waste."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas, which was phased out in 1996, resulted in anxiety, depression and ADHD symptoms in generations of people:

Exposure to lead in gasoline during childhood resulted in many millions of excess cases of psychiatric disorders over the last 75 years, a new study estimates.

Lead was banned from automobile fuel in 1996. The study, published Wednesday in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, looked at its lasting impact in the U.S. by analyzing childhood blood lead levels from 1940 to 2015. According to the findings, the national population experienced an estimated 151 million excess mental health disorders attributable to exposure to lead from car exhaust during children's early development.

The exposure made generations of Americans more depressed, anxious, inattentive or hyperactive, the study says.

The researchers — a group from Duke University, Florida State University and the Medical University of South Carolina — found that the exposure also lowered people's capacity for impulse control and made them more inclined to be neurotic.

Lead-associated mental health and personality differences were most pronounced for people born between 1966 and 1986, according to the study. Of that group, the greatest lead-linked mental illness burden was for Generation Xers born between 1966 and 1970, coinciding with peak use of leaded gasoline in the mid-1960s and mid-1970s.

[...] The groups born around 1940 and 2015 had the lowest lead exposure and lead-associated mental illness, the study reported.

[...] There is no safe level of exposure to lead, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even small amounts are associated with developmental and learning difficulties, given that lead exposure is known to harm the brain and the nervous and reproductive systems. Children under 6 years old are most vulnerable to lead poisoning.

[...] The study comes a couple of years after Reuben and other researchers found that exposure to leaded gasoline lowered the IQ of about half the U.S. population. That study estimated that childhood exposure to lead from gasoline cost Americans about 824 million IQ points.

Lead was originally added to gasoline to improve engine performance. Use of leaded gas increased after World War II until it proved damaging to catalytic converters, which became required in the 1970s. Some of lead's hazards were known long before it was banned from gasoline, but reducing exposure to it did not become a federal priority for many years.

[...] "We've done a lot of good in the U.S. reducing lead exposures. Blood lead levels have gone way down, but they could go down further," he said. "I hope that we can learn from the history about how much harm we caused in the U.S., and try to apply that moving forward."

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.14072

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Bitcoin hits $100,000: what next for the booming cryptocurrency?:

What next for Bitcoin after bursting $100k barrier?

Bitcoin's price has blasted through the much-anticipated threshold of $100,000, raising questions about how much higher it could go - and whether it can shake off its notorious volatility.

The world's largest cryptocurrency rose to around $103,400 shortly after 04:00 GMT on Thursday, before falling slightly.

Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at AJ Bell, described it as a "magic moment" for the cryptocurrency and said it had a "clear link" to Donald Trump's election victory.

Trump took to social media to celebrate the milestone, posting "congratulations Bitcoiners" and "you're welcome!"

The president-elect had previously pledged to make the US the "crypto capital" and "Bitcoin superpower" of the world, helping to push Bitcoin's price higher once he was elected president.

It broke through the $100k barrier after Trump said he would nominate former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commissioner Paul Atkins to run the Wall Street regulator.

Mr Atkins is seen as being far more pro-cryptocurrency than the current head, Gary Gensler.

"Clearly there is anticipation that the new administration is going to be somewhat more favourable to crypto than the old administration was," said Andrew O'Neill, digital assets expert at S&P Global.

"So for the price of Bitcoin, I think that that's what's driven the trend so far [and it will] likely continue into the new year," he added.

However, Bitcoin has a history of sharp falls as well as rapid rises - and some analysts have cautioned that is unlikely to change.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/the-raspberry-pi-5-now-works-as-a-smaller-faster-kind-of-steam-link/

The Steam Link was a little box ahead of its time.

[...] Valve quietly discontinued the Steam Link gear in November 2018, but it didn't give up. These days, a Steam Link app can be found on most platforms, and Valve's sustained effort to move Linux-based (i.e., non-Windows-controlled) gaming forward has paid real dividends.

[...] As detailed in the Raspberry Pi blog, there were previously means of getting Steam Link working on Raspberry Pi devices

[...] Sam Lantinga from Valve worked with the Raspberry Pi team on optimizing for the Raspberry Pi 5 hardware. As of Steam Link 1.3.13 for the little board, Raspberry Pi 5 units could support up to 1080p at 144 frames per second (FPS) on the H.264 protocol and 4k at 60 FPS or 1080p at 240 FPS, presuming your primary gaming computer and network can support that.

[...] I have a documented preference for a Moonlight/Sunshine game streaming setup over Steam Link because I have better luck getting games streaming at their best on it. But it's hard to beat Steam Link for ease of setup

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Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Open-source OpenWrt One router released at $89 — 'hacker-friendly device' sports two Ethernet ports, three USB ports, with dual-band Wi-Fi 6

This 'Unbrickable' router should never fail you.

More than nine months after OpenWrt began finalizing its $100 open-source router, the consortium has finally released the OpenWrt One. According to the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), one of the groups working alongside OpenWrt, this wireless router "will never be locked and is forever unbrickable" as it was built-for and comes with the open-source OpenWrt firmware pre-installed.

The group worked together to draft the specifications for this router, and then OpenWrt tapped Banana Pi for the device production. You can now order a complete set with a case on Aliexpress for just $89 (although it's out of stock at the time of writing), but the tinkerers among us could choose just the logic board for $68.42, though it's unavailable in the U.S. at the moment.

[....rest omitted....]

The OpenWRT One router is designed with 'software freedom and right to repair' in mind

[....]

OpenWRT is an open source, customizable operating system based on the Linux kernel, designed primarily for networking devices — such as routers. While the OpenWRT One is far from the first router to support OpenWRT, it is the first to be designed from the ground up for OpenWRT, by the community behind the project, with the full source code published from the get-go.

A core selling-point, according to the SFC, is that the OpenWRT One can't be locked down or bricked — it gives the user full control, allowing them to modify, repair, and update as required.

[....rest omitted....]

Where did the WiFi router go?
He went data way.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Japan's priceless asteroid Ryugu sample got 'rapidly colonized' by Earth bacteria

Scientists have discovered that a sample of the asteroid Ryugu was overrun with Earth-based life forms after being delivered to our planet. The research shows how successful terrestrial micro-organisms are at colonization, even on extraterrestrial materials.

The samples were collected by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)'s spacecraft Hayabusa2, which launched in December 2014 and rendezvoused with Ryugu in June 2018. Haybusa2 then spent a year studying the asteroid, which has a diameter of around 3,000 feet (900 meters), before diving to its surface and scooping out a sample.
...
"We found micro-organisms in a sample returned from an asteroid. They appeared on the rock and spread with time before finally dying off," team leader Matthew Genge of Imperial College London told Space.com. "The change in the number of micro-organisms confirmed these were living microbes. However, it also suggested they only recently colonized the specimen just before our analyses and were terrestrial in origin."

The discovery took the form of rods and filaments of organic matter, which the team interpreted as filamentous microorganisms. Exactly what type of microorganisms these were isn't known by the team, but Genge has a good idea of what they may be.

"Without studying their DNA, it is impossible to identify their exact type," the researcher said. "However, they were most likely bacteria such as Bacillus since these are very common filamentous micro-organisms, particularly in soil and
rocks."
...
"Before we prepared the sample, we performed nano-X-ray computed tomography, and no microbes were seen," Genge said. "In any case, the change in population suggests they only appeared after the rock was exposed to the atmosphere, more than a year after it was returned to Earth."

The researchers found that within a week of exposing the specimen to the Earth's atmosphere, 11 microbes were present on its surface. Just a week later, the population of terrestrial colonizers had grown to 147.

"It was very surprising to find terrestrial microbes within the rock," Genge said. "We usually polish meteorite specimens, and microbes rarely appear on them. However, it only needs one microbial spore to cause colonization."

While these results don't really tell us anything about extraterrestrial life, they do speak to the hardiness of life forms here on Earth, particularly micro-organisms. The findings also have implications for the effects that spacecraft and rovers could have on the planets they visit.

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1111/maps.14288

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-donut-effect-persists-major-cities.html

What is the shelf life of a freshly baked donut? Two days, tops. But when it comes to an entirely different kind of donut—one that Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom described early in the pandemic when he measured the exodus of people from city centers to city suburbs—there appears to be no expiration date.

That's the key takeaway of Bloom's research of the "donut effect," a term he helped coin that refers to the hollowing out of big-city financial districts, the rising attraction of surrounding areas, and the impacts on local economies.

Since the pandemic, the country's 12 largest cities have cumulatively lost 8% of their downtown dwellers. Three-fifths of the households that left moved to nearby suburbs, according to the study, which was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bloom also finds a steep drop in the number of businesses located in the business centers of these major metro areas, which include New York, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Meanwhile, the donut effects for other U.S. cities have either been much smaller or haven't happened at all.

For policymakers and business leaders in large urban centers, the study results may come as a surprise given widespread perceptions that their downtown economies are bouncing back to pre-pandemic health.

But Bloom and his co-authors—using rich data on real estate demand, migration flows, commuting patterns, public transit use and consumer spending—conclude that's not happening. And the flight from city cores promises to reshape America's largest cities in the long run, they say.

We have often heard of people who now work from home either frequently or even permanently. But do any of you live in the downtown areas of your city? How has the 'donut effect' changed your way of life? Is it better now or worse?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

FBI and CISA officials said it was impossible to predict when the telecommunications companies would be fully safe from interlopers:

Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers.

The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it has not yet been fully remediated. Officials on a news call Tuesday refused to set a timetable for declaring the country's telecommunications systems free of interlopers. Officials had told NBC News that China hacked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to spy on customers.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the call Tuesday, two officials — a senior FBI official who asked not to be named and Jeff Greene, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — both recommended using encrypted messaging apps to Americans who want to minimize the chances of China's intercepting their communications.

"Our suggestion, what we have told folks internally, is not new here: Encryption is your friend, whether it's on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication. Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is encrypted, it will make it impossible," Greene said.

The FBI official said, "People looking to further protect their mobile device communications would benefit from considering using a cellphone that automatically receives timely operating system updates, responsibly managed encryption and phishing resistant" multi-factor authentication for email, social media and collaboration tool accounts.

The scope of the telecom compromise is so significant, Greene said, that it was "impossible" for the agencies "to predict a time frame on when we'll have full eviction."

[...] The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have a complicated relationship with encryption technology, historically advocating against full end-to-end encryption that does not allow law enforcement access to digital material even with warrants. But the FBI has also supported forms of encryption that do allow some law enforcement access in certain circumstances.

[...] In a statement to NBC News, Ron Wyden, D-Ore, one of the Senate's fiercest privacy advocates, criticized America's reliance on CALEA as it leaves such sensitive information unencrypted.

"Whether it's AT&T, Verizon, or Microsoft and Google, when those companies are inevitably hacked, China and other adversaries can steal those communications," he said.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/12/from-diapers-to-mouths-of-babes-how-splash-pads-sickened-over-10k/

There's nothing quite like a deep dive into the shallow, vomitous puddles of children's splash pads. [...] But the brave souls at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have done it, wading into 25 years' worth of records on gastrointestinal outbreaks linked to the wellsprings of fecal pathogens. And they unsurprisingly found enough retch-inducing results to make any modern-day John Snows want to start removing some water handles. [...] In all, the outbreaks led to at least 10,611 illnesses, 152 hospitalizations, and 99 emergency department visits. People, mostly children, were sickened with pathogens including Cryptosporidium, Camplyobacter jejuni, Giardia duodenalis, Salmonella, Shigella, and norovirus, according to the analysis, published Tuesday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The tallies of outbreaks and illnesses are likely undercounts, given reporting delays and missed connections.

Though previous outbreak-based studies have provided bursts of data, the new analysis is the first to provide a comprehensive catalog of all the documented outbreaks since splash pads erupted in the 1990s. [...] Once infectious material gets into the water, disinfection systems that aren't working properly or are inadequate can allow pathogens to gush from every nozzle. Splash pads aren't unique in having to handle sick children in poopy swim diapers—but they are unique in how they are regulated. That is, in some places, they're not regulated at all. [...] The primary method for keeping recreational water free of infectious viruses and bacteria is chlorinating it. However, maintaining germ-killing chlorine concentration is especially difficult for splash pads because the jets and sprays aerosolize chlorine, lowering the concentration.

Still, in most splash-pad linked outbreaks, standard chlorine concentrations aren't enough anyway. [...] In 2023, the CDC recommended new health codes that call for "secondary disinfection" methods to keep Crypto at bay, including disinfection systems using ozone or ultraviolet light. Another possible solution is to have "single-pass" splash pads that don't recirculate water.

In all, to keep splash pads from being geysers of gastrointestinal parasites and pathogens, various changes have to happen, the CDC experts say.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

LinkedIn have become a AI regurgitation chamber. More than half of all text, longer then 100 words, is now assumed to be AI generated.

https://www.wired.com/story/linkedin-ai-generated-influencers/

Originality scanned a sample of 8,795 public LinkedIn posts over 100 words long that were published from January 2018 to October 2024. For the first few years, the use of AI writing tools on LinkedIn was negligible. A major increase then occurred at the beginning of 2023. "The uptick happened when ChatGPT came out," says Originality CEO Jon Gillham. At that point, Originality found the number of likely AI-generated posts had spiked 189 percent; it has since leveled off.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

First image of the shape of a single photon revealed in light study

The first direct visualization of the shape of a photon has been created. These particles of light are impossible to photograph, but physicists at the University of Birmingham have now calculated their wave function to produce an accurate image of a photon as it's emitted.
...
However, one thing photons can never capture images of is other photons. That's because they don't interact with each other in any way. But now, Birmingham physicists have created the next best thing: a mathematically accurate visualization of the shape of a photon.

"The visualization is an exact simulation of a photon as it is emitted by an atom sitting on the surface of a nanoparticle," co-author Ben Yuen told New Atlas. "The shape of the photon is deeply affected by the nanoparticle, making it thousands of times more likely that the photon is emitted, and even allowing it to be reabsorbed by the atom multiple times."
...
... Instead, it's an intensity distribution – basically, a map of where you could expect to find the photon at a certain point in time. Brighter areas indicate a higher chance of the photon appearing there when its location is measured.

"The visualization is exactly that distribution of a photon a short time after it has been emitted," Yuen told us. "Because it's a quantum particle you cannot measure it in one go as the measurement destroys it. However, if you were to repeat the measurement of where a photon was detected many times, you would see exactly this distribution.

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

It's orangeish-green, with blue spikes, on a dark background

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/12/certain-names-make-chatgpt-grind-to-a-halt-and-we-know-why/

OpenAI's ChatGPT is more than just an AI language model with a fancy interface. It's a system consisting of a stack of AI models and content filters that make sure its outputs don't embarrass OpenAI or get the company into legal trouble when its bot occasionally makes up potentially harmful facts about people.

Recently, that reality made the news when people discovered that the name "David Mayer" breaks ChatGPT. 404 Media also discovered that the names "Jonathan Zittrain" and "Jonathan Turley" caused ChatGPT to cut conversations short. And we know another name, likely the first, that started the practice last year: Brian Hood.

[...] When asked about these names, ChatGPT responds with "I'm unable to produce a response" or "There was an error generating a response" before terminating the chat session, according to Ars' testing.

[...] ChatGPT-breaking names found so far through a communal effort taking place on [social media] and [Reddit].

• Brian Hood
• Jonathan Turley
• Jonathan Zittrain
• David Faber
• Guido Scorza

[...] We first discovered that ChatGPT choked on the name "Brian Hood" in mid-2023 while writing about his defamation lawsuit. In that lawsuit, the Australian mayor threatened to sue OpenAI after discovering ChatGPT falsely claimed he had been imprisoned for bribery when, in fact, he was a whistleblower who had exposed corporate misconduct.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The world currently produces more than 50 million tonnes of “mismanaged” plastic waste each year, and some researchers project this flood of pollution into the environment will double by mid-century. However, they also say that if countries can agree to adopt four key policies during global plastic treaty negotiations this week, we could slash that by 90 per cent.

Plastic pollution ends up clogging ecosystems on land and at sea. “This has an impact on every level of the food chain, from phytoplankton cells to humans,” says Sarah-Jeanne Royer at the University of California, San Diego. Plastics are also responsible for about 5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.

That is why most of the world’s countries are meeting in Busan, South Korea, this week to hammer out the final details of a global treaty aimed at ending such pollution. In 2022, 175 countries agreed to develop a legally binding treaty and have spent the past two years debating its requirements, with particular disagreements over setting limits on the production of new plastic.

To bring more clarity to the debate, Douglas McCauley at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues used an artificial intelligence model trained on economic data to test how the policies under consideration would affect this pollution globally. “I wasn’t convinced that [eliminating plastic pollution] was actually possible,” says McCauley. “But it turns out you can get pretty darn close.”

According to their projections, under current conditions, such pollution is set to roughly double to between 100 and 139 million tonnes by 2050. But a combination of four policies, all of which are still on the table in the current treaty draft, were enough to reduce this by more than 90 per cent.

The most impactful was a mandate that plastic products contain at least 40 per cent recycled material. That rule alone cuts plastic pollution in half by mid-century. This effect is so significant because it reduces demand for newly made or “virgin” plastic, while also spurring demand for recycled materials, says McCauley. “Suddenly there’s a giant global market for recycling.”

But recycling on its own wasn’t sufficient. “If your target is to end plastic pollution, you need to do things across the entire life cycle,” he says. Deeper cuts required limiting production of virgin plastics to 2020 levels. This cap cuts plastic pollution by around 60 million tonnes per year by the middle of the century, according to the model. This change also had the greatest impact on greenhouse gas emissions from plastic production, as extracting fossil fuels and turning them into virgin plastics involves emissions-intensive processes.